It wasn’t a good summary on my part. But I still don’t see how ‘speciation occurs within “peripheral isolates” - small portions of the main population which are separated from the parent population and diverge rapidly’ doesn’t = large amounts of change in *short amounts of time.
*geologically speaking
I’m not so sure. Everything I’m finding says that chimpanzee top speed is around 40km/hr, which is comparable to human speed.
There’s more than that. I infer that they’re thinking that evolution is a directional process with humans as the pinnacle, and if one set of apes climbed the evolutionary ladder to achieve human-hood, why didn’t the chimp population do the same thing? When I’ve heard the “why are there still apes” question, it’s a given that there’s a serious misunderstanding of evolutionary theory underneath it, but I’m never sure just where they ran off the rails.
What about the issue of distance? My understanding was that humans had success partially because they can outrun lots of animals over long distances. If it’s a 10 km race between a chimp and a human, I bet the human would easily win.
Did you mean to say “an organism” instead of “species”?
AFAICT different characteristics are passed on by mutation and, in sexual organisms, genetic recombination. Not by selective pressure. Selection only acts on the RESULTS of variation, it is not the CAUSE of variation.
Average chimpanzee speed is around 25 mph - but they can sustain this for about a 40-second charge. Average top human speed is around 18mph but we can only sustain it for 15 seconds.
Chimps and gorillas have a much higher proportion of muscle than us. Pound for pound they are incredibly strong and fast. Despite the fact that they rarely weight over 140 lbs they are about 4-7 times as strong as a human man. It makes sense that they would excel at sprinting.
I couldn’t find gorilla data but they are enormous so I don’t see how they couldn’t outstrip a teeny little human.
I thought Ludovic was joking. But sometimes it’s hard to tell.
Do you have references for these claims?
Because a) speciation does not require “large amounts of change”, and b) even the geologically rapid speciation proposed by PE relies on existing evolutionary mechanisms. The mutation rate doesn’t (necessarily) change, but, as I mentioned before, it’s a lot easier for a given variation to become fixed in a small population than in a large one; but, the same variations can have much more dramatic effects.
Actually, The Ancestor’s Tale is both recent and non-screed-y. Oh, and bloody good.
Ring species being a good illustration of this.
Obligate grazing herbivores are obviously not direct competitors to omnivorous hunter/scavenger humans; however, at the advent of animal husbandry and free range feeding, herds of grazing herbivores are a threat to our herd animals, both in direct competition for resources and (in the case of domesticated species derived from indigenous wild species) the possibility of undesirable hybridization or cross-breeding. Most predatory megafauna were not direct competitors either in the sense that they maintained a Nash equilibrium with prey species that left plenty of animals available for hunting by modest human populations. Conflict between humans and predatory species occurred when static human settlements placed enough of a demand on local resources to seriously threaten the viability of local predators, particularly apex predators.
Stranger
Band name.